Recently, portable intelligent terminal devices have become popular and more compact in size and the contents of messages and data to be transmitted/received have been complicated. In association with this, efforts have been made to enhance the visibility of displayed information and to reduce or eliminate erroneous recognition of the displayed content by various modifications of the display.
For example, in some communication terminal devices, the display is adapted to display a plurality of operation items and a cursor indicating which one of the items is currently selected. On some of the displays, characters and numerals with a plurality of display sizes are displayed.
Pixels are arrayed in columns and rows in a matrix manner on the screen of a liquid crystal display. Information can be displayed on the screen by two fonts. One of the fonts is a smaller font consisting of a smaller number of dots while the other font consists of a larger number of fonts. Therefore, a larger number of characters can be displayed by using smaller font while a smaller number of character can be displayed by using larger dots.
The larger font is principally used to indicate the characters which are entered by users while smaller font is generally used for displaying messages from the device. However, if the number of characters which are entered by user exceeds a predetermined number (for example, 20), the fonts could be changed from a larger size to a smaller size.
For example, messages from the device are displayed on an upper row by means of smaller font. If the number of characters which are entered by users is less than 10, the characters are successively displayed on a next lower row adjacent to the upper row by using larger font. If the number of entered characters exceeds 10, however the preceding message of initial 10 characters of larger font on the next upper row would be replaced with the message which is displayed by using smaller font and eleventh and subsequent characters would be displayed by means of larger font on a third row. If the total number of the entered characters reaches 20 and/or exceeds it, all entered characters would be displayed with the smaller font.
Such a front changing capability enables larger characters to be entered by confirming them while the number of entered characters is less. This makes it possible to reduce an erroneous entry such as mistyping, for example.
A concept to change the sizes of fonts has been adopted in word processors systems such as word processor and computers which are capable of processing documents. It is tedious to fill a table blank that is encircled by lines with characters, especially when the width of the blank is fixed and the number of the characters are optional, since the font size of the characters to be entered should be determined. Accordingly, the number of characters to be entered was calculated by adding the number of the already characters with that of the characters which will be entered. The result was fed to a font size calculating unit in which the maximum font size of the characters which will be accommodated of the row in interest is automatically calculated from the row size and the calculated number of characters. Characters having a calculated font size were then displayed on the display.
In other words, in the prior art device, information to be displayed was limited to messages which are entered by users the fonts were changed by the calculation of the number of characters to be entered, so that as many characters can be displayed as many. Therefore, only changing from larger font to smaller font was permitted. Moreover it took a long period of time to change characters to be entered to that of the already entered characters.